Read this book for my book club. When I finished the book I was glad to be done. At the time all I felt was that it was tedious. Maybe it was just that I had other books I really wanted to get into and was growing impatient. After our discussion I realized I did enjoy several of the characters. Trigiani does have a fun writing style but I still feel she could have tried to not go on so many different times about how she was feeling about her marriage. It was bordering on whining to me. We got it the first few times. This is a very real look at marriage and how we need to work at it. She had some very insightful things to share so it was not a waste of my time. My book club liked it a lot. ( )

Ave Maria married Jack MacChesney eight years ago and now, in this second book of the series, has to make the decision of a lifetime. While visiting in Italy, she meets a handsome stranger and must make the decision to choose the man who is truly her destiny.

Ave Maria has been married for eight years now. She and her husband have a beautiful daughter, but they've also had some very difficult times. Now Ave feels that they're growing apart. Everyday life has gotten in the way of love, and it's time for both of them to make some decisions about what they want out of life.

I like Ave a lot, I really do. So this melancholy book was hard for me to read. She is so unhappy. She has ample reason to be; she really has been through some things that no one should have to go through. But I wanted some moments of grace for her. She has some mostly carefree moments, but those felt wrong and my stomach was in knots, afraid she would make the wrong decision.

The quirky characters that I loved in Big Stone Gap do, of course, make an appearance in this book. But they aren't being all that quirky. They're mostly sticking their noses into Ave's business and giving her advice that just seems to confuse her.

Ave ends up in Italy for a while, and I did love the descriptions of the countryside there. I want to see that field of bluebells.

Ave is in a very different place emotionally than she was in Big Stone Gap. I still liked checking in on her, but other readers should be ready for this more introspective, somber book. ( )

Wikipedia in English

BIG CHERRY HOLLER, the extraordinary sequel to BIG STONE GAP, takes us back to the mountain life that enchanted us in Adriana Trigiani’s best selling debut novel. It’s been eight years since the town pharmacist and long time spinster Ave Maria Mulligan married coal miner Jack MacChesney. With her new found belief in love and its possibilities, Ave Maria makes a life for herself and her growing family, hoping that her fearless leap into commitment will make happiness stay. What she didn’t count on was that fate, life, and the ghosts of the past would come to haunt her and, eventually, test the love she has for her husband. The mountain walls that have protected her all of her life can not spare Ave Maria the life lessons she must learn.

BIG CHERRY HOLLER is the story of a marriage, revealing the deep secrets, the power struggle, the betrayal and the unmet expectations that exist between husband and wife. It is the story of a community that must reinvent itself as it comes to grips with the decline of the coal mining industry. It is the story of an extended family, the people of Big Stone Gap, who are there for one another especially when times are tough—including bookmobile librarian and sexpert Iva Lou Wade Makin, savvy businesswoman Pearl Grimes, crusty cashier Fleeta Mullins, and Rescue Squad captain Spec Broadwater, who faces the complications of his double life. Ave Maria’s best friend Theodore Tipton, now band director at the University of Tennessee, continues to be her chief counselor and conscience as he reaches the pinnacle of marching band success.

When Ave Maria takes her daughter to Italy for the summer, she meets a handsome stranger who offers her a life beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ave Maria is forced to confront what is truly important: to her, to her marriage, and to her family. Brimming with humor, wisdom, honesty, and the drama and local color of mountain life from Virginia to Italy, BIG CHERRY HOLLER is a deeply felt, brilliantly evoked story of two lovers who have lost their way and their struggle to find one another again.